Business

'The Daily' Is Dead: What Does it Mean?

Rupert Murdoch and Apple’s big bet on an iPad-only subscription-based old-school newspaper, The Daily, turned out to be a losing one. I’m not surprised. For as slick-looking as the iPad publication was, it never had the scent of success.

It’s true, The Daily was ever-so briefly near the top of paid iPad app heap. On its first birthday, The Daily reported 100,000 paid subscribers and was the third-top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes store. That birthday party, however, was short-lived. Last summer, News Corp slashed The Daily staff, laying off 50. Now The New York Post will absorb some of the remaining staff and digital publication.

There was nothing wrong with The Daily. I’ve seen many iPad publications – mostly magazines—and visually and from a content perspective, The Daily looked just as good and read nearly as well as many of them.

The problem was The Daily’s daily nature. It put it in competition not only with every daily newspaper and Web site in America, but put an enormous financial burden on News Corp. just to keep it running. It’s pretty clear to me that the subscription model did not do what News Corp. and its partners anticipated when it launched in Feb 2011.

During the launch event Apple’s Eddie Cue described The Daily as a new model for other subscriptions-based iPad products from other publishers. “We think subscriptions will only help them get more customers,” said Cue. He might as well have followed that comment up with, “and rainbows always end in a pot of gold.”

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch was, naturally, even more bullish, “[Our] ambitions are very big, but our costs are very low. In getting to this stage we spent $30 million dollars, all of which have been written off.”

Murdoch, of course, knew better than anyone else, that the true cost of a daily publication (online or otherwise) is not the launch costs, it’s the daily churn. At launch time, Murdoch put the run rate costs at “less than a half million a week.” So a couple million down the pipe every…single…month.

Anyone who knows anything about publishing understands that you have to sustain astronomical growth in subscribers and advertisers to keep those costs from consuming you. 100K readers a year in does not equal “astronomical.” The Daily needed millions of paying subscribers.

I honestly don’t know if it was the costs or lack of subscribers that killed The Daily, but though I gave the enterprise a fighting chance, it’s now quite clear to me that daily digital, original, hyper-curated content is not what 21st century digital natives desire.

Spend a moment thinking about your own content consumption habits. Do you spend an hour or more on any given day with a single digital publication or even platform? I know I don’t.

For daily news and, especially, breaking news, I do my own curation. Twitter and its aggregator platform Tweetdeck is better and faster than any daily newspaper. Obviously, I often end up at sites like The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today. But I start on Twitter. Other people use curation/aggregation tools like Flipboard to create their own digital newspapers and magazines. We no longer trust a single publication to give us the worldview in real-time.

The other big blunder is a trend that is now obvious to everyone: News providers cannot survive on a single mobile product. If you want to be on one platform, say, iOS, you can potentially survive because at least you get to iPads, iPhones and iPods. In other words, those seeking the latest news and analysis will not stand for being forced to switch back to one mobile device just to read your news. And they do not want a news organization to choose one device (or even platform) over another.

The Daily’s decision (with Apple’s encouragement) to remain on the iPad alone for the first year was laughably old-school. It made The Daily as much like a traditional newspaper as possible: If you left your iPad at home, it was unlikely you’d see the current edition. Most people I see on the daily commute have a variety of devices in their hands. They are reading books or perusing their feeds. They tend to go wherever their feed takes them and could not be bothered to switch devices.

Eventually, The Daily made it to the iPhone, Android and popular Android-powered devices like Amazon Kindle's Fire, though it seems like it was too little, too late. I do wonder what would have happened if News Corp. had launched on all platforms back in 2011. Perhaps I'd be telling a different tale.

The Death of The Daily should not be equated with the death of journalism, long-form reporting or story-telling innovation – all things The Daily sought to bring to its readers. It’s simply a reminder that, in the post-print digital world, the power has shifted from publishers to consumers. They build their daily digital newspapers on the fly. All publishers can do is seek how to become part of the mix.

For the time being, that means: multi-platform and recognition that you are simply one stop on your reader’s never-ending journey through the news web.

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